PS4
Play Station 4 Introduction ''' The Sony PlayStation 4 was recently released on the 29th of November, along with its competitor, Microsoft’s Xbox 1 which was earlier released on the 22nd. The starting price of the newly released Ps4 was only a mere $399, considering all of the technological advancements placed into the console. Alongside, the Xbox1 was priced at $499, which is slightly on the higher end but still within reason. The price differential was a great advantage for Sony, which helped sky rocket sales well past those of the X box 1. In conjunction with the Ps4’s low base price there were many other terrific attributes to the newly released console. The hardware that was installed into the new generation gaming console was leaps and bounds ahead of its prevision edition, the Ps3. I will be discussing the hardware in more detail in the further paragraphs. '''CPU Newly implemented into the Play station 4 consoles is the AMD Jaguar 64-Bit Central Processing Unit. The improvements between the previous CPU are astronomical. The AMD Jaguar is up to 10 times faster than the Ps3’s CPU. The Flop Speed of the CPU (also known as the floating-point operations per second) has a speed of 2 Flops. A Flop is essentially measuring the speed of the microprocessor. The microprocessor plays an essential role in the CPU’s efficiency. To sum it up, the higher Flop speed equals a faster the Microprocessor which allows the console to think at an extremely high rate of speed. The CPU is like the consoles brain and due to the new technology that has been installed in the Central Processing Unit. It allows it to think, like I said before, up to 10 times faster then the Play station 3. After all of the new technology that has been added, a large issue had been brought Sony. They have encountered many issues of the Ps4 overheating and they were having a difficult time cooling it down while trying to keep the slim design of the new console. The engineers solved this problem by not only adding in a new fan, but they used a system for the CPU which is the IBM NeXtScale x86. The new system can run at 40 °C so it solved the issue of the CPU overheating when in use. In retrospect, the Ps4’s CPU completely crushed the older models in both speed and efficiency. The CPU was the one piece of hardware in the System that had been changed the most compared to the older model. RAM Ram, also knows as R'andom '''A'ccess 'M'emory is also one of the most significant alterations that have been changed in the new Play Station console. The purpose of Ram is not for storage. Ram and Storage are two different things but they do still tie together. On one hand, the Play Station 4 is equipped with 500 gigabytes of built in storage. What Ram does, is it allows the console to remember previous information. So let’s say that you turn of the system without saving your game on to the hard drive. Ram will go back and start when you left off from your last save point. Although when you are done with a game and you close the program, then it is wiped out of the RAM in order to make room for more space, but it will stay on to your hard drive so you can use it later on. In the prior model, Sony installed 254 megabytes of Ram. The issue that occurred with this older model was that the Ps3 was running out of space to store the games information. With the latest Ps4 model there is absolutely no need to worry about loosing your progress after saving. The Play Station 4 has 8 gigabytes of ram, which is equivalent to 8,192 megabytes. That is exactly 32 times more Ram then the previous Play Station 3. '''GPU A GPU which stands for G'raphics '''P'rocessing 'U'nit is just like another brain for the console, but it is assigned to a different role then the CPU is. While the CPU worries about mostly all aspects of the console in order to make it run, the GPU helps to take off some of the strain from the CPU’S job. The GPU covers all components of the graphics for your games or any other activities you wish to perform with your console. Graphics is a hefty part of the hardware and by taking off the load from the CPU it allows it more space to think at a higher and more efficient speed. The GPU that was implemented into the Play Station 4 is the AMD that comes loaded with 1.84 Teraflops of computing power. In conjunction with its Teraflops the GPU also has 32 ROP’S which is twice as many as Xbox1. ROP is an acronym for 'R'ender 'O'utput 'P'ipelines. When the GPU is finished with all of its calculations, the ROP will actually compute the image and draw it out on the screen. Although it seems like 32 ROP’S is allot of speed, it doesn’t quite work like that. ROP’S are worthless if the GPU cannot support the full size. The GPU installed in the PS4 can only process 16 ROP’S. Since the GPU in the Play Station 4 contains 32 ROP’S, the other 16 ROP’S in the GPU are essentially useless and a waste of space. '''Dual Shock 4 Controller The Dual Shock 4 is the latest Controller model of the play station series. Besides from the obvious aesthetic changes made to the new remote, there are many new features that were put in to the new remote. To begin with, the most obvious feature is its brand new touch pad. The touchpad can be used as a new interactive aspect for the user. Certain games can use the touch screen for different uses. It’s up to the game developers to decide what they want the touchpad to do in their games. Also, a new feature is the light bar that is located on the top of the controller. The light bar contains 3 LED lights that can illuminate in different colors. The purpose of the light bar is to match the color up with the players in the games, so it helps identify each controller to a specific player. The light bar can also change colors mid game. For example the light bar can flash red, to indicate the user that they are low on health. There is a speaker on the new controller as well, to help with the audio aspect of the game. The Select and Start buttons have now been turned into one Options button on the right side of the touch pad. That makes room on the left side of the pad for the Share button, which enables players to share content almost instantly via social media. ' '